Facebook: Applications Aren't Meant to Be Installed - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/02/facebook-applications-arent-meant-to-be-installed/ <comment><USER2> I guess Facebook apps will start nagging users to "really" install them now, so the problem might only get worse.</comment>


Worst Flooding in Decades Raises Concerns over China's Three Gorges Dam - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/worst-flooding-in-decades-raises-concerns-over-chinas-three-gorges-dam-11595337875 <comment><USER2> Non-paywall version: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-floods- threegorges/...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-floods- threegorges/record-floods-raise-questions-about-chinas-three-gorges-dam- idUSKCN24F0E2)</comment>


Code faster with Intellij IDEA live templates - <AUTHOR> http://maciejwalkowiak.pl/blog/2014/01/14/code-faster-with-intellij-idea-live-templates/ <comment><USER2> I use Intellij to write python and love live templates. For instance, I've set ipdb<tab> to expand to import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace(), which seems small but has probably saved me so much time. It's really a win for programming in Java, because it automates the boilerplate. There's similar functionality in other editors too, such as YASnippet [https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet](https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet)

<comment><USER3> Similarly, I have `ni` (yes, blatant Monty Python reference) in PyCharm expand to `raise NotImplementedError("%file% %line%")`, for an ad-hoc web app breakpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could also be a subtle hint that the language in question (Java, Maven/XML) are too verbose. I mean, for dependencies and the like there's alternatives (for Java & co) in Gradle and SBT, or the very simple NPM and Bower formats; for build tools, see the same (and Grunt). There's no real benefit (anymore) to use XML for that kind of configuration.

Same with Java. Functional programming makes for much more expressive iteration than the iterator / for-loop pattern does, and it's much less verbose (think list.map(doSomething)).

<comment><USER5> Yes, but so what? Sometimes a little IDE love is a lot easier and more productive than changing your entire stack to use a different language/tool. Verbosity is a downside which might be more than offset by other upsides. It might certainly be beneficial to change your stack, but that's usually a very big decision that might have some serious and unforeseen consequences. Verbosity alone is rarely reason enough to make a switch.

<comment><USER6> Why the "Yeah, but so what?" rhetoric?

This is an important point, regardless. Sometimes new projects are started and it's not a matter of switching. Sometimes verbosity, and the things it negatively impacts, are worth switching. That's what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I still don't know what a monad is, but I agree with the "pure" functional programming crowd that this kind of boiler plate generation is _expletive_ retarded.

If your language isn't Lisp and cannot make macros to sub in the variable bits in an otherwise redundant template pattern, you might have some other options, though.

For those of us condemned to industrial, "enterprise" languages, you might try using a DSL or (build-time!) code generator, rather than cluttering up your source code with editor generated crap.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been using these for years in Visual Studio.

My most commonly used one is "prop" which generates an automatic property in C#: "public string Name { get; set; }". I type "prop", then hit tab, string is selected and I can change it to any type I want, hit tab again, I can now change the name of the property, hit enter and I'm done Takes 1.5 seconds.

<comment><USER9> Idea had this back in 2001.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For vim users: [https://github.com/garbas/vim- snipmate](https://github.com/garbas/vim-snipmate)

</comment><comment><USER11> This works really well for php on phpstorm as well (when working with bootstrap and knockout.js it's _very_ handy).

What I would love (and if it can do it I've not found it) is to be able to do something like

koo(fooBar)<TAB> and get something like

        self.fooBar == ko.observable("");

would be amazing!.

<comment><USER12> You can create live templates yourself in intellij:

Settings -> Editor -> Live Templates -> JavaScript

And add the live template for abbreviation 'koo' and template text like:

self.$VAR$ == ko.observable("")

See [http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/live- templates.html](http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/live-templates.html) for more information.

<comment><USER11> I already do that.

That though inserts the template and lets you tab through it.

What I'm suggesting is to pass fooBar _before_ you expand the template so that you don't need to tab through it (similar to how zen-coding does id's and classes on html)

i.e.

func(returnFoo,$foo,$bar,$fizz,$buzz)<TAB>

becomes _without having to tab through_.

        public function returnFoo($foo, $bar, $fizz, $buzz)
        {

        }

<comment><USER13> If you use vim you can use [https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips](https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips) and write python code to generate the output.

<comment><USER11> That looks awesome.

Embarrassingly for someone who has been a Linux user for more than 15 years I'm terrible with Vim (I can just about use it systems administration (though I often just use nano)) and use IDE's for most things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anybody know another resources about live-templates ( some advanced ) ?

<comment><USER15> I found the IntelliJ docs[1] handy for discovering predetermined variables like $END$ and $SELECTION$.

[1]: [http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/live- templates.html](http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/live-templates.html)

<comment><USER16> Yes, setting up variables in the live templates is just...so BEAUTIFUL! You can create default values and tab through them, changing them as needed.

Don't know what I'd do without PyCharm.</comment></comment></comment>


Samsung Surprise as World's First Smartphone with Quantum Technology Launches - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/05/15/samsungs-surprising-new-5g-smartphone-is-worlds-first-with-quantum-technology/#7c0e952d30e0 <comment><USER2> The product page for the chip in question is also worth a read.

[https://www.idquantique.com/random-number- generation/product...](https://www.idquantique.com/random-number- generation/products/quantis-qrng-chip/)</comment>


Review our startup: Instantly create a blog theme that matches your website - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogic.com <comment><USER2> Went through the demo. Here is my advice:

1\. The pitch of "instant blog theme to match your website" is a compelling one, and could lead to a profitable business model IMO.

2\. For a version 1/MVP, I think it worked reasonably well.

3\. However, I don't think it's a compelling enough feature to build YetAnotherBloggingPlatform and convince people to switch. I'm convinced Blogic would be way more enticing if you simply created themes for WordPress, Tumblr, and Posterous and charged $ for it. If you can scrape my site and build a blogging platform, then you can easily create the CSS/HTML/PHP necessary for these platforms.

Besides, do you really want to deal with 1000s of abandoned blogs, battling comment spam, and trying to play feature catch-up with these guys? ( _"Posterous does X. Why don't you? WordPress has Y. Why don't you?"_ ) Trust me, you don't

Of course, this means you're now competing with the likes of ThemeForest, et al. But that's not a bad thing. They've proven that people will pay to make their blog look good.

My $0.02

<comment><USER3> First off this is a great idea. I'd pay (see caveats below).

100% agree on YABP. It never even occurred to me that this would lead me into your "non-standard" blogging platform. I can't imagine most people wanting to do that. I know I wouldn't.

But I think combining this with WordPress _hosting_ would make for a killer unique selling angle for non-tech savvy folks that need to setup a blog for their business. Selling a one-time use blog template generator isn't super compelling. Recurring revenue is SO much nicer.

If it was me I'd either:

1\. Go into the same business as <http://wpengine.com/> and use this as the differentiator or

2\. Make this in to an engine you could sell to every company that hosts WP and it's friends.

<comment><USER4> It might me much nicer but the market is a lot smaller. The market for WP Themes from your main website includes every website with custom design that wants a blog. I also wouldn't underestimate how many people would pay a lot of money for this. Not 20$ but more like 200$. Not ramen startups that do everything through sweat equity but normal companies that would have to pay someone to do it. 200$ doesn't get you very far if you tell a designer to create a blog template based on your website. As an added plus they can already show you the end result so if you like it there is absolutely no risk involved.

Also the two products are in no way mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I, on the other hand, thought the site as quite snappy. My biggest confusion was that I was trying to add multiple sections to be replaced on the first step, rather than delete it later. I would really suggest trying out the "remove the part you don't want" before adding what you do. In my eyes, I always see what I want to remove before what I want to add/change.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great feedback, we never thought about it like that, but it makes perfect sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd think hard about who your customer is. At most companies, there's a designer either on staff or on retainer that worries about these sorts of things and I'm not sure they are likely to spring for your services. Similarly, the vast majority of small businesses won't see a need for a blog, or they will already have a templates version built into the platform they are already using (i.e. shopify, etc.) I agree that theming blogs can be a hassle, but I'm not sure the market you've chosen is big enough to make a go of it. Some of the other commenters have some interesting ideas about how to address the needs of a larger market, but even then, the intersection might be too small. I'd think really hard about whether or not this is worth investing in - not saying it is or isn't, but just that its worth spending some time getting very comfortable with the answer to that question.

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been a challenge for us. Some types of businesses have no real need for a blog, or run on a comprehensive platforms such as Shopify or a CMS.

An ideal customer would be a SaaS business with a small staff (5-20 employees) that is big enough to be able to afford throwing a few hundred bucks at a blog, but small enough that the developers/designers don't have the bandwidth to work on a blog. Businesses this size probably have a full-time designer that could design the blog, but there is a sweet spot where it's not worth it to spend their time on anything but the revenue-producing product. Our best example is <http://www.transferbigfiles.com> (<http://blog.transferbigfiles.com>). They have a full-time developer/designer, but he simply doesn't have the bandwidth to also maintain a blog design. Is this market big enough? We think so, but there are several other potentially larger markets for our theming technology that we could easily expand into.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, I'm one of the founders. We started Blogic to cure the headache of recreating your website's theme on an entirely separate blogging platform such as WordPress. It was a huge pain with my last startup, and inspired me enough to solve it. Please email sean [at] blogic [dot] com with any suggestions or feedback.

<comment><USER7> I'm in the same boat as many others here. I am a bit of a control freak with my content so I prefer self-hosted Wordpress. If I your product can give me a wordpress theme at the end of it that I can self-install I would pay $20 for that.

<comment><USER8> Replying to this, but directed to the original authors: don't make it $20, it's too cheap for a product like this, make it $49 and plenty of people will still pay for it. I'm assuming you will be offering a WP template as the output (nobody's going to move to your blogging platform).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bug: Using the iPad, it capitalizes the first letter of the word so <http://skimthat.com> turns into Http://skimthat.com. Your system doesn't see the lowercase <http://> it's expecting and adds the prefix again causing the invalid url <http://Http://skimthat.com>

Solution: Create a string that contains a lowercase version of the url to do the <http://> check or ignore case with regex.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow! This is great. I wish I knew about your just 3 days ago when our developer spent a few hours creating our custom blog :) I am still thinking of switching to this because of the automated Twitter, Facebook and Google+ add ons. Very impressed!

One feedback is that when I was customizing the blog theme, I was not able to see how the sidebar would look in the blog. As a result, I went through the entire process first time around and then went back to revert the 'add sidebar'.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't want your blog platform. I want my Blogger blog (yes, Blogger) to match my website, even if it's not perfect, without spending 3 hours pulling my hair out. That, I would pay for.

By the way, I'm just getting a spinny right now, so I can't comment furhter. Will try again after the HN effect is gone.

<comment><USER12> I wish I could visibly up vote this. Please don't leave Blogger out of the equation.

<comment><USER11> It baffles me to see WordPress site after WordPress site go down due to a HN hit. All that trouble when you can get everything you need from Blogger for free. Yet everyone looks at me funny when I say I use or recommend Blogger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is really awesome, and helps bootstrapping blogs for startups. What I would personally pay for is: the same functionality, but in the end, give me an option to export as a Wordpress/Tumblr/Posterous/Blogger theme. That would be kick-ass.

</comment><comment><USER14> My first impression was "wow, slow site load." Maybe add a few more servers before posting to HN ;)

EDIT2 - The site is responding a LOT faster now, it must have been a one-time issue.

When trying to replace the content of my site (beeets.com) in Chrome 14 I get

www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js:6 Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'stringify'

so I'm not able to review the product

\- EDIT (error from Firefox 7, more or less the same)-

Error: JSON.stringify is not a function Source File: <https://www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js> Line: 6

<comment><USER15> _(Wrong):_ Sounds to me like JSON2.js failed to load or timed out for you, probably accounting for the slow load & eventual failure. Refreshing should do the trick!

 _Update_ : Your site, Beeets.com, doesn't seem to be working for me, either. It loads fine but I can't select a content area. Probably some sort of JS conflict — though this is, encouragingly, the first time we have actually seen this in the wild! We'll take a look.

 _Update2_ : It looks to me like Mootools, which your site is including, redefines window.JSON (which is native in modern browsers, and which we include for old browsers) with an object that is incompatible with the browser-native JSON method "stringify". [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/JSON/stringify). But in my jsfiddle attempt to confirm this, Mootools is playing nice… maybe some other script on the page is doing this.

<comment><USER14> Multiple tries, two different browsers, no reported resource loading failures from my dev tools (All scripts are loading).

<comment><AUTHOR> Really sorry for that failure, it's definitely on our end somewhere, but appears to be unique to your site. That's the beauty of the problem we're solving - unknown inputs. Can I email you when it's fixed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Absolutely fantastic. All that's needed is to be able to export to Wordpress or Posterous. Other than that, this solves a _huge_ problem of mine!

Great work on taking on such a problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> What would be awesome is something like this for e-mail.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone for the quality feedback and bug finding :)

To address the most common feedback, we have decided to create a theme generator for WordPress and are in the midst of development. Other platforms will likely follow. We actually decided this a couple weeks ago, so it's reassuring to hear this.

If you'd like to be notified when the WP generator is ready, shoot me an email: sean [at] blogic [dot] com

</comment><comment><USER9> I couldn't get this to work with any website I tried. It just sits on the "Loading… This shouldn't take long." screen.

Can someone suggest a url to try?

<comment><USER15> Hey, sorry, seems we spontaneously developed a case of yep-that's-gonna-time- out. Should be good now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's weird that I need to refresh after I added a sidebar. And I don't get to choose the sidebar. So if I designate the content area, but want the sidebar in another area of the web page, this is not possible.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice idea - I think you could use a bit of tweaking regarding elements you can select, for example I don't think anyone wants blog posts in divs smaller than 100x100px

</comment><comment><USER20> I would think that many websites these days start with a blogging platform for a combination product presentation / blog. At least we did. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER21> Buggy.

It also pops up a nag dialog when you try to close it, which is a crucifixion offense in my books.

<comment><USER15> Haha, totally understood, glimcat. We hate those too, but they are necessary to prevent some sites from auto-redirecting the whole page elsewhere (e.g. nytimes.com did/does this).

Clicking "start over" disables the confirmation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The end result with my site looked pretty much like my current site, but with little Like buttons all over. I am not enamored. I'm sure others will find it useful, though.

<comment><USER15> > _The end result with my site looked pretty much like my current site_

Success!

> _but with little Like buttons all over._

There should have been a simple checkbox to remove the like buttons, if you don't prefer them.

<comment><USER22> There is a checkbox to remove the buttons. I'm just echoing my experience, since they want to know how it worked for me and what I thought about it. I'm a micromanaging kind of person that prefers to tweak all of my layout myself, so I don't really enjoy these kinds of tools, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lose every pop-up box announcing "OMG YOU'RE LEAVING THE PAGE! ARE YOU SURE?! DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE PAGE! YOU MAY LOSE YOUR DATA! DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE PAGE!"

I had to kill the browser session and selectively choose which tabs to restore.

We get it - you found javascript.

The site concept is great, but presentation is annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> We definitely agree this is annoying. What you experienced is not the goal or intention. It actually solves a technical problem but has this undesirable side effect. Some websites have JS to force break-out of an iframe, if the site is loaded in one. Since the iframe is core to the selection process, we added this to prevent the automatic break-out. Unfortunately, it applies to everything including trying to close the browser. We'll figure out a better solution eventually, but we don't want anyone to think that this was added to increase conversions or anything in that nature.</comment></comment>


W3 gets new Look - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/standards/

<comment><USER2> The absolute worst web design trend of 2009 is this header background that extends beyond the container and makes it look like the header is on a piece of paper that has been folded around the background. Let me show you what I'm talking about: <http://i.imgur.com/yP7CH.png>

It's a silly and needless ornamentation that wasn't cool or interesting when the first person did it, and became even more worthless and boring with each successive use. Bahhumbug!

I'll hug it and kiss it and apologize if I see it used in a way even remotely relevant to the context of the content, or integrated into the visual language of the design (e.g. on a blog about origami), but until then, I'm a hater. I'd rather see drop shadows under blinking text; at least that would be quasi- original.

Also, the blue logo area pops so ridiculously hard it makes it impossible to keep my attention focused on the rest of the page. I'd tone it down to a smooth #80a7d3, like you see in the image I linked above.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled w3 finally redesigned the site; on first impression it appears to be a marked improvement.

<comment><USER3> I dont really understand how you could dislike it so much, its a tiny flourish that gives a little visual hierarchy

<comment><USER4> What's the hierarchy that it establishes that the large type, all-caps, and oddly-spaced embossed icon didn't already establish?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks a bit like a generic domain squatters landing page. No soul. Before it showed clearly that passionate programmers where at work. Now it looks like a "design job". A bit too much for my taste.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if I would go so far as to say it looks like a domain squatter page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course the first thing I did was validate it. Couldn't help myself... It passed.

<comment><USER8> The HTML did, but not the CSS :-P

[http://jigsaw.w3.org/css- validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%...](http://jigsaw.w3.org/css- validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2Fstandards%2F&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en)

<comment><USER9> From the looks of the star html and _border declarations, validation is failing due to the IE-specific hacks :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The uppermost nav menu is a blob of text, the nav item "standards" is repeated (Standards, STANDARDS, standards, _S_ T _A_ N _D_ A _R_ D _S_ ) like the date of a monster truck rally, and there's no obvious difference between left-nav and top-nav. It looks like a blog from 2005 viewed in a browser with the wrong fonts. Who designed it?

<comment><USER10> It looks like a cheap bastardization of Drupal's default template that I think they launched with Drupal 5 several years ago.

Quite simply I think they tried too hard. The gradients and whitespace are extremely clumsy. It would look 10 times better with flat colors and standardized on some kind of grid and font size scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And still a wrong doctype or mime type, depending on how you look at it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not really a fan. The W3C does so much that their past homepages have suffered from a mass of undifferentiated links. This design attempts to solve the problem by taking down the number of links, but the dearth of contrast and colour means it's still very hard to tell what's important, what's time- sensitive, and what's always there.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't get the point of the drop shadow under the blue square where the w3c logo appears. It breaks the harmony. It bugs me.

<comment><USER14> Look at the bottom of the page. The footer has the same effect. IMO it's not a drop shadow but is supposed to suggest that the section below is curving smoothly away and back under as if that element was made of a piece of paper that was rolled over the top.

On the whole it looks like they were close to having something great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm tempted to say that index.html should be an index. You know 1994-style blue links in <li>'s in a nice hierarchy and nothing else. The old site used to be like that, deep linking from the front page to the specs etc. and a newsfeed in the middle. For some reason, I hate this new design. Maybe it's just "We fear change!"

</comment><comment><USER16> why are the left and top menus (standards, participate, ...) the same? that seems very odd for an otherwise fairly professional-looking page.

edit: and why have the "pointer" point to yet another instance of the word "standards" rather than the one in the top menu? i know it's way better than it was, but it seems odd to be so much better and yet still have odd things like that...

<comment><USER17> > _why are the left and top menus (standards, participate, ...) the same?_

Looks like the top menu is static, but the left menu changes as you navigate. Compare the two on this page: <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership- benefits>

Kinda falls apart on pages like this: <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fee- history>

There's a lot of needless elements though. Go here: <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html>, then click on the drop-down under 'Fees'. The 'current fees' link takes you to the same page that the 'Fees' link goes to. And the 'fee history' link goes to a page that is also linked to from the page the 'Fees'/'current fees' links go to.

Same with the drop-down under "Join W3C" The "Join W3C" link and the "how to join" link both point to the same URL: "<http://www.w3.org/Consortium/join>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They're using PHP and Smarty, from looking at comments in the source code.

I find it highly ironic that the people in charge of web standards and consistency use the programming language with least consistent syntax.

<comment><USER17> Does consistency in programming language somehow automatically translate to consistency in output?

<comment><USER18> No. What I find ironic is the cultural mismatch. PHP seems an unlikely language for technological idealists.

<comment><USER14> I don't think they are really idealists - more pragmatic than idealism implies.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Science Needs Metaphysics - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/why-science-needs-metaphysics <comment><USER2> It's a shame that philosophy has gained such a poor reputation in certain circles.

I mean, it's understandable: the extent of most people's interaction with philosophy is with cartesian-style "but can we even know we exist??" navel- gazing -- or worse, with the intentionally obscure bits of continental philosophy.

Because of this reputation, many (the majority of?) scientifically-minded people view it as a binary choice: you're either a good empiricist or you're one of those damn poststructuralist lit-crit people from the humanities department.

IMHO: people who hold this mindset risk missing out on a powerful tool for their mental toolbox.

<comment><USER3> Step 1: Name a single piece of information* gained from philosophy that is not currently debated.

This is why people look down on philosophy. While people might pretend to disagree with this, I would take the complete lack of counter examples as agreement.

PS: And because debate about word choice is so popular, _information: facts provided or learned about something or someone._

<comment><USER4> One neat result in metaphysics is the discovery that there can't be a property for every predicate, since this gives rise to analogs of Russel's paradox. (Does the property of being a non-self-exemplifying property exemplify itself?)

<comment><USER5> This is a result in logic, a branch of mathematics. Logic, as practiced inside mathematics, is far more advanced than what's practiced inside philosophy departments. Something like more than 95% logic professors inside philosophy departments cannot competently explain anything in logic after Godel & Tarski.

<comment><USER6> It seems to me that there is no clear break between logic and philosophy?

Nor between logic and mathematics.

There is also the idea that part of why philosophy is dismissed is because people tend to take results and say that the result isn't really part of philosophy.

Could this be because their idea of philosophy is that it has no results, so any results they are shown are concluded to be not part of philosophy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The argument is the same as some religious use: science can't explain everything, therefore we need religion. The counterargument is the same too: while science can't explain everything, religion and metaphysics explain nothing. The other inconvenient fact is that lots of things that were previously thought to be not explainable by science have since been explained by science. Science will continue to nibble at religion and metaphysics and the religious and meta-physicists will continue to move the goalposts.

<comment><USER8> That's one of the key points of the article. You can't reasonably extrapolate that the goalposts will always move. Just because science is able to discern more than we expected in the past and will continue to do so in the future, doesn't provide us with any concrete reason to trust that its eventual scope is equivalent to the full breadth and depth of potential understanding. In fact, quite the contrary since the great virtue of science is that its scope is limited to empirical, quantifiable truths.

You can avoid that uncomfortable question by proclaiming empirical reality to be the only reality, but that's a metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite.

<comment><USER9> For anybody who studies science that isn't an uncomfortable question and it's over century old at this point. The last time the field of science had a high level of certainty that it would solve everything ever was probably the late 1800's.

I dealt with this question in high school physics, it's really no big deal. When you get to a point where all you can do is make a "metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite" you go find something better to do with your time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Summary: Philosopher believes philosophy is important.

Next we ask this expert on extraterrestrial life whether extraterrestrial life exists.

<comment><USER11> Summary: Non-fibbler disparages fibbling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article reminds me of my first two years in college when I was studying physics and taking some philosophy courses. The professors and the department chair eventually found out who the science kids were and then vehemently tried to recruit us into double majoring, or at least minoring in philosophy. And then a few of the kids from philosophy came over to the physics side to take some classes and some of them got minors/double majors. I never did get that minor, but those philosophy classes were some of the best I took over the 4 years.

The sciences and the philosophies are incredibly intertwined and to argue otherwise or dismiss philosophy as useless is just being lazy. While in many ways they are different, fundamentally they are identical. We are seeking a better understanding and explanation of the world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Like many subjects in recent times (last 50 years or so), they've gotten really entrenched and dusty because they're afraid to go beyond their well defined borders (and then get more difficult to teach and make industry out of).

IHO, from a bigger anthropological viewpoint, philosophy and religion are extremely rich areas of idea prototyping. They came first. They are based on intuition and are good-faith efforts to understand our world. Science came later and was much better at it. What needs to happen culturally is that people need to all be philosophers, they need to have a reverence toward the sacred and toward the cultures that hold it dear. However, they can't let religion, or philosophy, prematurely cut off in their minds what the realm of science can embody. There are long lists of famous scientists that did this, and even they were proven too quick to place arbitrary limits on science and prescribe "everything else" as religion, or metaphysics.

To me, philosophy/religion/metaphysics are all "pre-physics" in a way. Intuitions without proofs...yet. The intuitions of many individuals, over many centuries, however seemingly incorrect scientifically, aren't completely worthless. It's like saying art is worthless. They may not explain mechanically how something behaves, but they offer insight and new ways of thinking, which are really at the core of how to truly understand something difficult.

</comment><comment><USER14> are the four fundamental forces not already "metaphysics" ? such is the position of both philosophy and common language , great tools for cooperation and ethics , but subjective semantic arguments are most certainly dead ends when observing and determining the most probable reality.

</comment><comment><USER15> TL;DR: Man who's devoted his life to woolly thinking, thinks about things in a woolly fashion.

Note 1

"If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we know may simply reflect the categories of the human mind. We can perhaps only deal with things as they appear to us. How things are in themselves may forever be beyond our grasp. Alternatively, the reality that we seek to understand may not even be subject to rational understanding. It may be sufficiently chaotic and disordered to be unintelligible."

Note 2

"There is such a thing as scientific progress, and it happens through systematic trial and error or, in Karl Popper's terminology, conjecture and refutation. A "scientific realist" has to be wary, though, about how such realism is defined. A realism that makes reality what contemporary science says it is links reality logically to the human minds of the present day. Science is then just a human product, rooted in time and place. Bringing in future science - or ideal science \- may sound more plausible, but even then there is a distinction between science reflecting (or corresponding to) the nature of reality and it being simply a human construction."

That's the problem with the article, and a lot of Trigg's ideas. He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed". Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak different languages would express itself differently. However you analyse the structure of an atom is irrelevant to its structure: it is what it is. Sine qua non. There's something which is an atom, whatever you call it and however you discover it.

The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact the case. Which it doesn't. (Don't confuse this as a dismissal of uncertainty - that certainly exists, but even that lack of certainty can be expressed in certain terms and understood).

Editing for clarity:

By "the output of science is flawed" \- I phrased this poorly. I don't mean that the interpretation of results is flawed, which it obviously can be. See phlogiston, early models of the solar system and so on. Rather, I meant that he seems to imply that the nature of what's being studied can change given the human looking at it and their understanding. Which isn't correct. Whether you understand how the solar system works or not makes no impact on what it's doing or why it's doing it.

I'd have been more accurate to say "the eventual output of the scientific process, upon where it has arrived at the correct answer, is flawed".

<comment><USER16> > He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the > output of science is flawed".

What's so wrong about this? It seems so obvious it should be uncontroversial. The first several dozen scientific hypotheses to explain any given phenomenon are all bound to be very very wrong. Even the big-t Theories have to be adjusted many many times before and after they start to get referred to as such.

We have no idea what's true until long after the fact. Many respected scientists of the early 1900s believed in and contributed to the science of eugenics. Scientists we still respect today for their contributions to other fields.

> Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak > different languages would express itself differently.

Again, why the scornful dismissal? The scientific establishment of the West differs in many ways from the establishment in the East. Not just language, but culture also produces differences. We managed to collaborate with the Soviets to do space missions, but it took an awful lot of work to do it. Medicine can have some very striking differences.

<comment><USER15> Because those differences are a reflection in differences of understanding, not of how the underlying system being studied actually works. Whether or not you say that the sky being blue is because of light and the composition of the atmosphere and the current weather, or because the Sky God made it that way has nothing to do with the actual reason why. It's solely a reflection of your explanation. It is how it is for a reason, and that reason doesn't change because your explanation does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Can Science Explains Everything

[ _cringe_ _cringe_ _twitch_ ]

</comment><comment><USER18> > Can Science Explains Everything

Yes.

Edit: I think a scary number of you guys are conflating the process of science with our current observational model. Quantum theory is the product of science, it's not science itself.

<comment><USER19> This is a strange belief to hold, considering we can prove this not to be the case with pure logic.

Suppose we observe that when A happens, B occurs. This does not imply that A causes B. In fact, we can _never_ confirm that A causes B, regardless of how closely we measure the reaction. 'Preposterous!' I hear you say on the other end of the intertubes.. but alas, it is true. Beyond the realm of reality and hubris we might observe that in fact X causes Y, and that A is simply an observable effect of X. Similarly, B is just an effect of Y. If you really want to explode that mind, think about how broadly this concept can be applied.

<comment><USER20> This is a flawed argument. Nothing can be proven in that sense. We cannot even prove that 1 = 1. I cannot prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but there is a high probability it will.

<comment><USER21> I had a professor in college who, when challenged with that kind of "but we can't _knoooowwwww_ " argument, would reply "Alright, you are correct. But for the sake of not being an insufferable twit, let us assume that 1 = 1 and move on..."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Warning: Pokemon GO Is a Death Sentence If You Are a Black Man - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mobile-lifestyle/warning-pokemon-go-is-a-death-sentence-if-you-are-a-black-man-acacb4bdae7f#.vbe27ytlo <comment><USER2> There is a good point made here (that black people are unwelcome in many desirable spaces and that Pokemon GO makes people behave oddly).

The title is clickbait, though. It should be something like, "Pokemon GO could get a black man killed".

<comment><USER3> I think it's a decent illustration of the fact that chilling effects of racial profiling are even more omnipresent that outright profiling.

As a white male, there aren't many situations where I have to think "How are people going to perceive my being in this public space?"

And that's absolutely unjust.</comment></comment>


Three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface - <AUTHOR> https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/07/01/play-a-video-game-using-only-your-mind/ <comment><USER2> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632)

If I understood the paper correctly, the results are totally unimpressive. The experiment setting seems to me to be intentionally convoluted to sound impressive. Like it's just creative bullshitting.

This is how it works:

(Edited after scribu corrected me)

1\. Senders make a decision by concentrating on flashing lights. They use EEG- cap to capture difference in spectral power between light flashing 17Hz and 15 Hz using the Welch's method. The choice is difference averaged over several epochs in 10-second period (must be very low paced game). Lots of signal processing and averaging to get yes/no answer between bright 17Hz and 15Hz visual signal from steady state visually evoked potentials.

2\. This one bit of information was then conveyed to the Receiver using TMS using signal where 10 consecutive pulses is yes, absence of pulses is no. Thresholds are well calibrated beforehand so that yes/no can transmitted. Receivers gets TMS signal that is completely different from what Senders did.

<comment><USER3> The senders do NOT control the cursor by hand. From the paper:

> The Senders convey their decisions of "rotate" or "do not rotate" by > controlling a horizontally moving cursor (Figure 8) using steady-state > visually-evoked potentials (SSVEPs).

<comment><USER2> It seems that you are correct. The cursor is moved by concentrating on the lights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "We essentially 'trick' the neurons in the back of the brain to spread > around the message that they have received signals from the eyes. Then > participants have the sensation that bright arcs or objects suddenly appear > in front of their eyes."

Incredible. Also, the article mentions using a coil to stimulate the receiver's brain. Is this some form of trans-cranial magnetic stimulation?

By the way, in case anyone wants to listen to a decent critical theory lecture on neuralink-esque technologies, here's one by slavoj zizek [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38alQSKtVbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38alQSKtVbA)

<comment><USER5> Yeah from the image at the start of the article, it looks like they're using TMS. You can see the coil sticking out to the right behind the man facing the camera. It's attached to a blue arm.

Furthermore if you look to the right of the coil, there are 3 little silver balls. These are coated in an IR-reflective layer (silver color) that are used by a camera to track the position of the coil in 3D space. This is more than likely a Localite system if anyone wants to look it up.

My guess is that the people had MRI scans, which were used to find the right place to stimulate. The Localite system uses a pointer with another 3 balls that is pointed at key positions of the head and then slid around the surface of the head. The head also has its own 3-ball tracker. This allows the Localite system to get an accurate reading of head size and positioning in 3D space. This also allows the system to "place" the brain image from the MRI inside the head. Then, using a screen, you get an augmented reality view of the TMS coil and the brain relative to the head to get accurate positioning and angle to place the coil.

The 3-ball tracker for the head was probably removed for the image, but you can see it in the image further down in the article. You can also get a better view of the TMS coil. You can also see the Localite system in action on the monitors and the camera in the top right.

It's really cool stuff.

<comment><USER6> Your description of the localization approach is accurate, but this system is almost certainly Brainsight, given the screen shown in the image at the bottom, the IR camera in that image, and the shape of the tracker arm.

The general approach is straightforward: MRIs are have real-world coordinates. Anything on the head (TMS, EEG, a surgical instrument) also has real-world coordinates. To co-register the two, you need to associate 1) markers at MRI time 2) markers at TMS time.

Once you have that correspondence, you can position any other objects relative to either one, like surgical instruments with reflective markers or TMS systems or whatever.

<comment><USER5> Looking at it again, you're right. That isn't Localite. I should've said localization system instead. I'm not familiar with Brainsight and I haven't been involved with the research using Localite in a couple of years, so I missed that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Neuralink presentation a few days ago made the important point that the physics of neurons makes it impossible to read and/or write their state with any kind of accuracy without getting very, very close to them.

As such, these kinds of completely non-invasive methods of interfacing with the brain are a dead end. Barring breakthroughs in scanning technologies that completely upend basic laws of physics, you will always be limited to a low- bandwidth channel that only works by reading the crude, aggregate state of the whole brain or a large area of it, and requires extensive training for participants to learn how to send basic signals.

Since the limits here are hard physical ones, not ones that can be engineered around, there's no way for this to be gradually refined into a more useful system. It will ways be a hack. If we're going to produce high-bandwidth brain-machine / brain-machine-brain interfaces that allow useful collaboration, it's going to require getting inside the skull and getting up close and personal with brain matter, whether we like it or not.

</comment><comment> d--b This is a little weird. Why would you use a Tetris like game for this? There is only one bit sent.

It's also quite hackish. To select yes or no, they have to look at some flashing lights the scientists know are going to generate different patterns in the brain. So it's not like the guys are thinking "yes" and that's being transmitted.

Similarly the receiver's brain is being stimulated kind of randomly by electrical impulse.

It's basically electrical communication but where the transmitter and receiver are wired in unsual places in the brain...

<comment><USER5> Of course it's hackish. The technology is still somewhat rudimentary. They're stimulating the visual cortex and the only way to do that (or stimulate brain areas in general) in a non-invasive way is using TMS, which isn't "pinpoint" accurate. It's shooting a strong magnetic pulse to stimulate the surface of the brain through the skull. Since TMS doesn't have deep penetration for the receiver and neither do the electrodes for the senders, they're limited to surface areas of the brain.

The places are not unusual.

In terms of the senders, it would probably have been easier to simply use an eye tracking camera to gauge which one they were looking at, but it wouldn't have been "brain-to-brain". We're still a LONG ways off from telepathic-like communication. We're also a long ways from even picking up "yes" or "no" signals from people's thoughts. It's still an important achievement nonetheless to get such readings from the senders and to make such manipulations to the receivers conscious visual perception, even if it's not measuring conscious thought or creating a specific image.

<comment><USER8> > _We're also a long ways from even picking up "yes" or "no" signals from > people's thoughts_

Yes and no. No because even though the tech exists, it's not exactly ready for the masses and doesn't work 100% and usually needs calibration and isn't exactly comfortable to wear. Yes because technology allowing people to form words on a computer by picking individual letters based on just EEG exists already; so that's more then yes/no. Likewise there's the experiments to have people move robot arms etc. (i.e like Neuralink from Musk, which isn't really new). You can even already buy commercial games where you control a cursor on the screen based on just 2 electrodes.

<comment><USER9> My understanding is that what musk is doing isn't new in the sense of novel but new in the sense that he's pushed the refinement of the technology to the outer envelope.

Which is a pattern with him (and a good one) in that he takes existing tech and pushes it to the outer envelope, batteries, motors and rockets all existed long before musk was born but he's done valuable and interesting things with them.

Someone had to make a technology for for market.

<comment><USER8> _new in the sense that he 's pushed the refinement of the technology_

That's what I understood as well. For example there's a mutlitude of practical problems with current in-brain electrodes, ranging from limits in the amount of them, their lifetime, lifetime of connectors, surgeries being quite difficult, possible problems with infections etc. None of them are extremely hard to solve but it basically requires a ton of money being thrown at and that seems to be Musk's plan, allowing to get like 3000 electrodes with the preamp/digitizer stage implanted subcutaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "This is the first demonstration of ... a person being able to both receive and send information to others using only their brain."

I'm completely blown away by the gravity of this achievement. This is a somewhat unassuming article for one study among many, but yet here we have something that, in my opinion, is essentially the equivalent of the discovery of how to create fire, or the invention of iron. Of course it will likely take many more decades at least before we can scale this and use it in a more practical way. Nevertheless, maybe I'm being melodramatic but I really feel like we have very clearly just entered into a new age as a civilization and species.

<comment><USER11> Melodramatic... perhaps. I don't see it as brain to brain. Eyes are clearly required to stare at the yes or no pulses for the sender's.

Seems like an extremely low bandwidth way to digitise 'thoughts'.

Also a bit skeptical about the receipt of this single bit of information being directly into the brain. Essentialy zapping part of the brain to cause a perceived flash. It's and incredible gap still toward encoding something as complex as a real thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wouldn't want to be an early adopter for this type of technology. Even just play old VR is still so new that we don't know what sort of effects prolonged use will have on physiology and cognition, and direct stimulation of the brain, a system whose precise functioning still seems so largely unknown to us, seems all the more dangerous.

I feel that some day we will be able to comprehensively decode neural communication but I would liken our current state to something like surgery in the Victorian era. I wonder if these student volunteers see the situation differently than I do, or if they are just that brave.

<comment><USER13> VR really isn't new. It's quite literally been around a few decades. Longer if you count devices like Sensorama[1] but the Oculus-style VR headsets that we're familiar with now has been around since the 90s (albeit at a significantly lower polygon count).

Plus there has been lots of research already about extended periods of altered realities. From people living inside mock space capsules through to simple experiments with people wearing special glasses[2]. Though granted I don't know of any research regarding extended use Oculus-style VR for weeks / months at a time, there have also been a lot of research regarding the use of such technology and how it can alter our mental perceptions beyond what we visual see (eg I cannot find a reference for this one but I did read research about people using avatars of the opposite sex and how quickly people came to register that was their pseudo-psyical body)

As an aside, this research reminds me a bit of Sword Art Online[3]. A Japanese light novel (which has been ported to different formats from anime through to computer games) and which is about "full dive" VR headsets.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorama)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Art_Online](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Art_Online)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Look at Neurable, they've been around for years: [http://neurable.com/](http://neurable.com/)

Tech is pretty good, and they're working on a VR headset which works with games. If you talk to the founder, his story is really interesting. He has an uncle who was crippled in a trucking accident, and his end goal is to create a version of this which can help cripples regain mobility. He's using games as his beachhead market to get traction, proof, a chance to iterate, $$$, etc. Pretty inspiring stuff, and "social-conscience" investing done right, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like OpenBCI hardware: [https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage/eeg](https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage/eeg)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is fine but doesn't present any jumps in technology. It's still just EEG. The electrical stimulation sounds pretty dangerous as it's non invasive so must have a pretty large stimulation zone.</comment>


Interactive Dynamic Video - <AUTHOR> http://www.interactivedynamicvideo.com/ <comment><USER3> Pokemon GO and Interactive Dynamic Video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f1fCCb3hVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f1fCCb3hVg)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this link. Really cool use case, and maybe Niantic will check it out, if they haven't already.

<comment><USER5> Yes, my battery doesn't drain nearly fast enough when I'm playing. This would definitely fix that.

<comment><USER4> Funny comment. :)

But actually this is unlikely to make a big difference on battery drain. Pokemon GO appears to be built on Unity and Unity is pretty notorious for having poor battery management. Whether you're pegging CPU or not, Unity burns lots of power. So, the incremental battery life hit is likely to be low in doing image processing on top of a frame.

<comment><USER6> Seriously, fuck Unity. It's the indy game equivalent of vendor-lock in, with everything negative about it.

They can't be arsed to fix a simple VSync bug on Linux, meaning even simple sprite games, or even more insulting: TIS-100, a game about _optimising assembly_ on fake retro-hardware, deliberately made to look like a _terminal_ , always burns 25% CPU power on my laptop.

More importantly, as Paolo Pedercini[0] mentioned on Twitter recently:

> _I can open my Flash crap from 15 years ago no problem, but a project I made > last year in Unity 5.1 crashes silently if rebuilt in Unity 5.3 I 'm telling > you: today's indie game production is a Unity monoculture that will > disappear at the next hardware architecture cycle_

[0] [https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/760904169444274176](https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/760904169444274176)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I first saw this (extracting audio from visual vibrations): [http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from- vibr...](http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from- vibrations-0804) it seemed incredible that the signal the cameras could capture was strong enough. This work is even cooler, even more non obvious and seems closer to wizardry.

</comment><comment><USER8> What exactly are the implications of this for construction engineering, which must already have some way of measuring vibrations?

I.e. does this measure something previously unmeasurable, or is it just that the visualization provides an extra channel for interpreting the data?

Or is it that it would make this kind of tool available to anyone with a digital camera?

<comment><USER9> The vibrational modes of a structure are a sort of signature. When it changes, that means something in the structure has changed. Perhaps a beam has rusted or buckled, or bolts have come loose, or concrete has cracked. This is traditionally tested by placing accelerometers in the structure, but it might be much cheaper if you could do it with a camera.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's TED a talk about the technology [http://www.ted.com/talks/abe_davis_new_video_technology_that...](http://www.ted.com/talks/abe_davis_new_video_technology_that_reveals_an_object_s_hidden_properties)

</comment><comment><USER10> The implications of this technology are staggering. He doesn't even talk about online use-cases, but imagine (just as an example) if YouTube added this algorithm to all it's video library, and started allowing you to interact with videos in very different ways. Crazy stuff.

<comment><USER11> Yes, so many applications, stop motion would benefit from this incredibly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The consumer use cases are interesting but the propagandist use cases are terrifying. Along with this (Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk)

<comment><USER13> Which country (or organization) do you think will be (or has already been) the first to implement a program of creating physical mimics of humans for military and intelligence purposes? With technologies like this and CRISPR, video, testimony, or genetic evidence could be thrown out the window in criminal or military cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Kids would go bonkers if they could record their toys and dance with them like at the end of that video.

</comment><comment><USER15> Signal Processing was that subject I found difficult and I found no reason to be interested in audio filtering, so I didn't find an incentive to work through that difficulty. Then I see applications of signal processing, like this, that goes beyond simple audio filtering, that makes me want to learn it again. Honestly, this looks like wizardry! It is no surprise, MIT is on the bleeding edge of signal processing and it mainly is due to Dr. Oppenheim . He wrote the textbook on DSP and runs the DSP Group at MIT.

</comment><comment><USER16> Papers of their findings can be found at [http://www.interactivedynamicvideo.com/publications.html](http://www.interactivedynamicvideo.com/publications.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder of you could use this on car commercials and thereby deduce the actual comparative quality of construction. Assuming that better built cars would vibrate less at speed. It would be interesting to understand where the vibrations occur.

A question for the authors. All the video is with vibrating but otherwise stationary objects. Must the object be stationary for these tools to work?

<comment><USER18> Probably not because in a lot of car videos there's no real car. Here's one simple example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7vTM4_rjhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7vTM4_rjhs)

There's a company that makes a rig that's basically just an engine and 4 wheels. You film your entire commercial using it and they replace it with computer imagery of your car in post. I can't find the video at the moment, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thats the next best thing to magic that I've ever seen

</comment><comment><USER20> This does look fascinating. The video is a bit showbusiness-like (for a lack of better expression).

A few questions if the author is on HN: I wonder how long it takes to analyse a 5 second video? Also, it seems the algorithm only works with static images after the initial video analysis, or am I wrong? Also, how long does it take to render the "virtual" state of the object?

<comment><USER21> Hey, first author here. Good questions.

The simulation runs in realtime, and is interactive. Generating the simulation can take a while though.

The 5 second video took about a minute to process on my laptop. But longer videos, and higher-resolution videos, can take much longer. For instance, we've used the technique on high speed video to recover audible vibration modes, and this can take hours to process because the video itself is so big.

I wrote the processing code in Matlab, and the simulation in c++ and GLSL. The simulation is pretty well engineered because I wanted it to run in realtime. I didn't put a lot of time or effort into optimizing the video analysis part though, so it probably could be made faster.

<comment><USER20> Hi!

Thanks for responding to my questions! The whole project is amazing and I hope you keep working on this (and future projects) with the same enthusiasm as you do now! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, more incredible image processing stuff from MIT. What's really cool is how it shows how much hidden information is out there there in world to be captured within a normal camera. We just need to be aware of it and analyze it properly. For me, it just re-injects a bit of wonder into the everyday world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER23> This might make the VRML included in MPEG4 useful. Could possibly use it to pass along the physical constraints and other data needed to make it interactive. ref: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_11)

</comment><comment><USER24> This would be fantastic for getting a feel for the tactility of a product you've not yet seen in person.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would love to see what this could do when combined with light field technology [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNJZHFZEkYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNJZHFZEkYQ)

</comment><comment><USER26> So if we can use this algorithm for Structural Health Monitoring (like a bridge shown in the video) - what's the major obstacle to replace all destructive testing in mechanical engineering with this kind of algorithm?

</comment><comment><USER27> Dedicated host name for a single algorithm, TED talk, high-production value video with professional animations, narrator talking excitedly, more kitschy examples of applications than description of the algorithm itself.

Yup, MIT.

<comment><USER21> I am a grad student. If you consider how many hours I work, I probably make less than minimum wage.

I am also the first author of the paper described in these videos, which my colleagues and I published in the top academic journal in our field.

I also made all of the videos, did the voiceovers, and hand drew the animations (though I'm flattered you think they were professionally done). I wrote and presented the TED talk. I purchased the dedicated host name for a single algorithm (using money from my own grad student stipend no less) and created the webpage myself.

I am an academic first, and I take academic integrity very seriously. I also take education very seriously. I consider educating the public about research to be part of my job, and this is done best when people are excited about the research.

Also, this work IS exciting. If it weren't we wouldn't have spent so much time working on it and it wouldn't have been published in ACM TOG. But back to flashy videos and press...

Consider that in the past three days, nearly 100,000 people (and counting) sat through a video where I explain what vibration modes are. VIBRATION MODES. They may have been lured in by pokemon, but kids who remember that video won't have to ask their physics teachers "but why should I care about this? what is it useful for?" Hell, if it gets people excited I hope teachers show it to their students before they teach the topic. I'm not making money off of these videos, I'm just stoked this many people are getting excited about research. Our paper has 17 numbered equations in it - it's not exactly a page turner.

When scientists don't make an effort to communicate their work to the public, that responsibility falls on people outside of the academic community - <USER2> who often don't understand the work. When we make things harder for the press, we only encourage them to bastardize the work to make it more palatable to the general public. By taking an active role in how we present academic work to general audiences, we can better shape the message, manage expectations, and help prevent content from being sacrificed for click-bait.

Ok, I'm going to get off my soap box now. Cheers! -Abe Davis

<comment><USER4> I think your work (and your promotion of that work!) is awesome! Please take heart in all the appreciation and encouragement in this thread (and elsewhere)!

<comment><USER21> Thanks so much! I really appreciate that :) And, in fact, I'm not at all upset about the original comment - I totally get where the skepticism comes from. Polish and substance are too often uncorrelated when it comes to science in the media. I think it's important not to assume they are anti-correlated though, because then we start discouraging scientists from trying to reach people beyond the academic community.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I'm Remaking OpenAI Universe - <AUTHOR> https://blog.aqnichol.com/2017/06/11/why-im-remaking-openai-universe/ <comment><USER2> Why not use game emulators? With popular NES emulators you can advance the game frame by frame. You can read the raw memory addresses that correspond to the score. You can dump the memory at any time and reload the game to a specific game state. You can even manipulate the games in many fun ways by messing around with the game memory. Or give an AI algorithm access to memory addresses as additional information, instead of relying on pure machine vision, if you want to do that..

Here's an example of a guy who made a general game playing algorithm that brute forces it's way through any NES game: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY) This isn't necessarily interesting from an AI perspective - the playing algorithm is just brute force. But it shows what can be done with the platform, easily reloading to previous states and exploring counterfactual futures (which is exactly the sort of thing RL algorithms do.) He also has a cool algorithm for finding the objective function of an arbitrary game, by watching a human play, and seeing what memory addresses increment. Which is a lot more easy to use than writing OCR code to read the score and game over states from the screen.

</comment><comment><USER3> (I work at OpenAI.)

Great project. We've found that the VNC Universe environments are hard for today's RL algorithms primarily due to the their async nature. We're currently working on a new set of Universe environments without VNC; I'm very happy to see others inspired by the core ideas of Universe as well.

<comment><USER4> honest question, how interested is the academia/industry in deep learning libraries & game engines integrations? I've worked on unreal and tensorflow the last semester, and I found out that there aren't any existing integrations. I will probably work on a plugin, but I wanted to know if there is any interest?

The way I see it, having hooks into the engines themselves helps with what the article talks about - not needing to go through VNCs or other _glue_ to get realtime data. It could potentially send the framebuffers themselves directly from the game/simulation and tie in the actions back to the game/simulation. And using framebuffers is just one direction, we could instead stream the co- ords/the current payoff/etc.

Also, having such plugins would help with the adoption in both directions - games now have an always updating/learning AI (might need a network connection + cloud backend), and researchers can have training/testing environments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Arthur Juliani is about to open source his interface for connecting ML agents to Unity3D game engine: [https://twitter.com/awjuliani/status/879142906178785281](https://twitter.com/awjuliani/status/879142906178785281)

<comment><USER4> Wow, that looks great! I guess that's what i'm intending to do with unreal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. Using HTML5 games in a headless browser makes a lot of sense because the need for VNC is circumvented. However, I think that while OpenAI's implementation is certainly not the best, having access just the information on the screen is not a bad idea in itself as a (maybe optional) constraint. With access to the game's internal state we don't even need RL for solving a large number of games - algorithms like NEAT are sufficient.

<comment><USER2> This project doesn't change that. The agents still only get screenshots of the game as far as I understand.

However I think this approach is bad. Machine vision is a separate problem from reinforcement learning. You shouldn't need to be able to do both well. Machine vision consumes a ton of processing power and researcher time in figuring out the hyperparameters. And all it's doing is figuring out information that's already in memory like the location of various objects and the score. It really limits what can be done. E.g. the famous atari playing AIs by deepmind were limited to no memory and only knowing the last few frames, because backpropagating through thousands of frames was too expensive.

Because of the way NNs work, it's trivial to separate out the machine vision into a separate module. So if you have a good RNN reinforcement learning system, you can easily add a machine vision learning system to it later if you need.

<comment><USER6> In terms of "backpropagating through thousands of frames", it's not as expensive as you might think. I've used TRPO to train RNNs on games like Atari pong with thousands of frames per episode. This can be done via an algorithm that reduces the memory complexity of RNN backpropagation (these algorithms didn't exist in 2013). See for example [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03401](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03401).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> According to the author, "Universe never really took off in the AI world."

That's a bit premature for a project that was just released less than 7 months ago, isn't it?

[https://blog.openai.com/universe/](https://blog.openai.com/universe/)

Edit: that said the project seems to have some interesting and needed improvements (esp time adjustment). Glad to see dialog between muniverse and openai here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/unixpickle/muniverse](https://github.com/unixpickle/muniverse)

[https://github.com/unixpickle/demoverse](https://github.com/unixpickle/demoverse)

</comment><comment><USER8> Awesome project.

Despite the flaws, the nice thing with VNC is its universality to support any apps on a computer. Using HTML5 in a browser limits the scope of things we could encapsulate as environments, and makes it less "universe".

However, there is a difference between the universality of the tech stack and the exposed interface. In my opinion, the future universe would be rich clusters of RL environments with unified API, each of which implemented using different underlying technology to meet the desired synchronicity and frame performance.

HTML5 could deliver one of such clusters.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that was the goal of OpenAI Gym. Gym tries to provide a generic interface for RL environments, and imho it does a nice job. I am working on Python bindings for µniverse now, which should allow µniverse to integrate with Gym.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a little surprised, but this seems like a good idea. HTML5 certainly has a brighter present and future than flash, and skipping the OCR stem should save quite a few CPU cycles.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am also working on related project. Flash and HTML5 games in chrome are great but they are very far away from the initially promised full blown GTA5, Starcraft and other complex envs. I am in process of remaking the Universe framework for host machine, since running those computation intensive games at reasonable frame is nearly impossible inside docker or virtual machines.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did openAI really unofficially abandoned universe ?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, really interested in hearing their take on this. It's not often you see a Musk-sponsored enterprise cast a major project aside without public comment.

<comment><USER13> It's because the people actually working on AI, including OpenAI, finally knocked some sense into Elon Musk. He finally realized how far behind AI is (it is a glorified linear regression) and we won't be seeing general AI for at least another 40 years.

Source: Am an AI research scientist.

<comment><USER14> Would be interested to know how you reached that 40 years number. I don't think we are even remotely close to AGI, 40 years to me seems extremely optimistic. That's within my lifetime.

<comment><USER15> Probably the same way everyone does, by pulling it out of thin air as a guess. When nobody even knows what theoretical breakthroughs are necessary, you'll always end up with a scattershot all over the place, even amongst experts. Try asking working mathematicians how long until the Riemann hypothesis is resolved one way or another, or look at what people were saying about Fermat's Last Theorem up until it was solved.

What we do know is that current techniques won't get us close to AGI, so something new is needed (or perhaps like backprop, something old will work once we have enough compute power). Personally I'm bullish on AGI because I have strikingly low faith in the ability of evolution to operate very effectively as a tool for algorithm discovery, so I suspect that once we've hit the compute threshold we'll find that many different algorithms can do the trick, and 40 years is probably not out of the question for us to hit that point (or 10, or 100), depending who you talk to about what the compute threshold might be.

I'd caution against putting too much weight in what experts say, though, since with a tiny few set of exceptions anyone working on "AI" today is actually just working on narrow AI, which is, as someone put it, just glorified linear regression. Those tools will almost certainly be part of the solution, but only in the sense that the classical theory of Diophantine equations was part of Weil's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem - they are not the core of the theoretical approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Evolution has been running ~10^19 experiments in parallel for billions of years: [http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are- ther...](http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/)

Evolution is a slow algorithm, but it had access to an absurd amount of compute (all neuronal organic matter on Earth) and environment simulation (all of physical reality on Earth) when discovering us; so the discovery of the algorithms/architectures/principles in our heads shouldn't be viewed as trivial.

<comment><USER16> The massive compute/time advantage evolution has makes me bearish about AGI. We really need to fix our compute capabilities before we can start overruning evolution. The math dictates it'll happen, but exponentially slowly if we don't innovate in compute.

<comment><USER17> There's more to the story, too: advances on top of CRISP may give us better tools to self-improve the species, accelerating evolution.

Personally, I'm bearish about AGI because I believe we will eventually realize that the brain is a glorified linear regression too, with a custom wiring to help learn language and vision.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean when you say that the brain is a glorified linear regression?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Funny, I have an old (unfinished) HTML5 space-exploration game by the same name:

[https://github.com/namuol/muniverse](https://github.com/namuol/muniverse)

If I had more time I'd submit a PR to integrate it...

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what's happening with OpenAI. Most big names are leaving.

<comment><USER20> Please elaborate...

<comment><USER19> Well, Ian Goodfellow and Andrej Karpathy for starters

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I echo all of your issues with running Universe. I have a decrepit Macbook, and it was actually not possible for me to use it at all.

<comment><USER22> If you have trouble running universe, how are you going to run RL algorithms that use lots of gpu and CPU?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Missed opportunity for a Rick and Morty Microverse reference here as the name

</comment><comment><USER24> Congratulations on the initiative, it looks very cool! Indeed, we found that running asynchronous environments, while possible, proved to be too cumbersome for research. We're now working on a synchronous set of environments for universe that are easier to use.</comment>


When will experiences replace movie theaters? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/experiences <comment><USER4> The spy 'experience' described is just a theme park ride or haunted house with different set dressing.

The reason there aren't more of them is that the described mechanics are so cost-heavy that it would be prohibitive to scale and operate on an ongoing basis. It's challenging enough to make a museum/theme-park ride that shuttles a dozen people through an 'experience' on a track without the line becoming prohibitively long. If you multiply the time taken to 'experience' the ride by having people go through at their own pace and only one or maybe two at a time, the costs would soar and the line would be absurd.

Haunted Houses skew more toward the described spy 'experience' than theme park rides, but even still the flow is carefully designed, there are no wrong choices, rarely obstacles and even with ticket prices and lines notoriously unpopular, almost none can afford to operate without the artificial scarcity of an impending holiday packing demand.

There are very good economic reasons why theme parks and haunted houses stick to experiences on rails and in groups.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, the obvious way that society has found to achieve these things is ... video games.

It's eerie how now that computers are intertwined with our lives, the idea of an advancing _virtual reality_ , able to give interesting experiences, is not something people fax poetic about anymore. The computer has already been assigned to some other category in most people's minds. Yet virtual reality will still advance and eventually give nearly any experience we might imagine.

<comment><USER6> What I take to be your mistake ('fax' for 'wax poetic') is an intriguing Freudian slip in this context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think these sorts of experiences burn out -- somebody has got to do a huge amount of work to create one and then how many times do you want to do it?

For instance, some people set up an indoor mini golf course with blacklights in a storefront at the mall near my town. My 9 year old and I went there maybe three times -- it was a cool idea but we weren't going to do it every weekend. They didn't quite last a year.

Similarly, a ski area that's a three hour drive from here set up a "ropes course" where you can put on a harness and climb up into thre trees. We had to pay for gas and a hotel stay plus the ticket and then my kid had a panic attack in the treetops and had to be talked down. Cool experience, but not something I can do every week.

The experiences which work out the best are the ones that we create for ourselves with a low budget -- like the frozen pond we discovered in a nearby state forest that we've been skating on or the radio transmitter club that a local amateur radio club is organizing this weekend.

<comment><USER8> > how many times do you want to do it?

Well, I've been to the St. Louis City Museum he talks about many times and I can't imagine getting tired of it. (Enjoy sticking your arms out and getting rolled upside down in an antique gigantic wine barrel? Or sliding down frighteningly steep slides intended for transporting shoes? Or crawling upside down in a thunderdome style metal rig on the roof of the building? Or watching a several hundred gallon barrel fill with water until it tips over? Or climbing in metal chutes outside a hundred feet in the air to arrive at a plane suspended in midair by cables? I do!) However, there are few (if any) other places like that.

<comment><USER9> Love that place... It is a well designed experience, and you can find something new each time. This is what increases experiences replay value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've never been at an "experience" where I could suspend my disbelief.

Taking the given example, when watching a movie, I can believe Matt Damon is a spy. I can't make myself believe I'm a spy. Whenever I'm in such situation my brain screams at me how ridiculous the premise is.

Experiences where I don't have to believe something ridiculous - <USER2> paintball, for example - are enjoyable, but they don't replace movies, not by a long shot.

<comment><USER7> A spy is the last thing I want to be.

There was a time I was on mailing lists and chat rooms where I know some of the people were connected with intelligence services and national police agencies, not just which ones.

At this point your life gets weird... People call your wife when you're not home with caller ID blocked and try to trick your wife into installing malware on your computer, etc.

It might be a little exciting at first, but the trouble you can get into in that life just isn't worth it.

<comment><USER11> Charles Stross wrote, in an introduction to a book, about the difference between James Bond and real spies, and pointed out that they are on the complete opposite side of any given spectrum.

Nobody wants to pretend they're a spy. Everyone wants to pretend they're James Bond.

<comment><USER12> Robert Baer's book "See No Evil" ([http://www.amazon.com/See-No-Evil-Soldier- Terrorism/dp/14000...](http://www.amazon.com/See-No-Evil-Soldier- Terrorism/dp/140004684X/)) also does a good job of this. Yes, he did get a crash course in arms and explosives while at The Farm (if I remember it correctly, he actually characterizes it as "terrorist school"). But what CIA case officers actually do is convince other people to spy for them - <USER3> don't do the spying themselves. They can't, because everyone knows they're American, since their cover is usually that they work for the US State Department at the embassy.

Baer also points out that a CIA case officer's job is unique in government, in that their explicit job is to convince someone else to break the law. Not US law, of course, but still: their job is to convince someone else to commit treason.

<comment><USER13> In the previous decade, the CIA has been expanding it's paramilitary officers too though. Less convincing people to spy, and more blowing stuff up. More of the action and cool gadgets part of James Bond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Going to the movies is an experience. It is the experience of the process itself (friends, meals, conversation, fun) and the meta experience of living someone else's experience on the screen. Is that really so bad?

</comment><comment><USER15> People don't go to the movies to experience adventure, they go to the movies to be told a story.

<comment><USER16> I had the same thought, but I take it even further,

Most people also don't go to be told a challenging story, they want something simple, quick and easy like popcorn.

I don't really know how to find the source, but I once read that netflix customers will put movies they feel they should watch (like important pieces of cinema) into their queue, but when they arrive the customer let them sit around longer before watching them than a generic mindless entertainment flick.

<comment><USER17> Bingo. If I'm up for a complex meaningful story - of which there are many in my queue - I'd rather go _do_ something. Dropped the DVD subscription in favor of streaming-only precisely because when I'm brain-dead enough to want to watch something I want to grab something suitably unenlightening from a menu of options, not whatever highbrow disc is sitting on my shelf collecting dust.

When the Great Netflix Psychotic Break happened, about a million customers came to the same conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In Germany, ropes courses gained a strong increase in popularity over the recent years. They are pretty fun and you can "magically fly" through the forest. You get this harness and can lock yourself into 300 feet long ropes in 30 feet heights and just fly from tree to tree. I'm sure, you can find them also in the US. If you get the opportunity, check one out.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ropes_course>

<comment><USER19> One of these was built recently in my backyard. Looks like great fun and they do good business. (Though I'm not going to pay $100 to tour the woods I hike daily for free)

<http://www.smuggs.com/winter/amenities/canopy-tour.php>

Another ski area just built a huge indoor waterpark.

There are tons of these types of adventurous opportunities out there. Movies are for the lazy.

<comment><USER20> Not sure if you've ever ziplined before, but the experience is totally different than hiking. Ziplining is definitely worth experiencing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When people become less lazy. And when it's not so stinking expensive. Most people locally find a $10 ticket to a movie egregious. Nothing you can 'experience' is so cheap, nor is it close. The nearest metropolis with all these experiences is about 45 minutes away - so time, fuel, ticket price ...

People are lazy _and_ broke. And fixing 'broke' doesn't usually fix 'lazy.'

</comment><comment><USER22> There's already a pretty good proxy for this: video games. Want to make your own story? Try D&D.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you want "experiences", they're there for the taking at any cost from free to $OMGk.

The problem isn't so much providing them (although other posters address the issue of cost), it's whether the customer does, in fact, want to do his part. Go to a movie theater, look around, and ask what percentage of attendees would, in fact, want to spend the next 2 hours going thru an approximation of what they're going to sit there, mouth agape, staring at. Most wouldn't, even if they could - which most couldn't.

The opportunities for experiences are there. Skydiving. Romance. Wilderness adventure. World travel. Competition. Artistic expression. Whatever. Spend as much or as little as you like, in both time and money. I've seen all kinds of "experiences" appear and flourish in a few decades. Lots of people participate in them, as the height of our culture allows and facilitates unprecedented indulgence in luxury "experiences". Oh, they may not be as objectively exciting, but subjectively they can be fantastic (first time I did paintball - about the same price & duration & space as a high-end movie - it sure wasn't a James Bond film, but instead of "that was neat, now what" I drove around the city loop twice screaming in residual endorphin rush).

The key is audience participation. Anyone can jet off to exotic locations for wild times for just a few days' salary, and for even just the price & time of a movie go leap out of an airplane or take a romantic walk. Most, however, would rather push a button and say "here we are now, entertain us."

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't get hung up on the "immersive theater" examples: Similar arguments would have been used to shoot down YouTube and the social web years ago. Instead, I think there's a lot of ground to be covered in lightly immersive, highly tailored experiences that reflect and tell stories through and about you, your friends and your environment. Narrative art doesn't need to be pinned to a screen, and neither does the magical shared experience of theater.

</comment><comment><USER24> The "experience place" that I would like to go to is like a kindergarten for hackers, a "hackergarten". It would let me play with many things that are too much of a commitment to do at home, like gardening or small woodwork or microcontroller electronics, and also it could have micro-courses, like a 2 hour lecture on magic tricks or kite building or simple chemistry.

<comment><USER25> You can go to workshops organized by hackerspaces or fablabs. Or you can look around and find a meetup you like.

<http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_ALL_Hacker_Spaces> <http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/labs/> (seems to be missing some places) meetup.com

<comment><USER25> Also I would like to mention <http://www.super-marmite.com/> <http://letslunch.com/> and all the other eat/cook with somebody opportunities.

You don't have to be a spy or somebody else to have some adventure. That idea is limited, just combine it with some other needs and there you have it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Burning Man is, in theory, devoted to interactive art. But, speaking from experience, those sorts of artworks are incredibly hard to create. In the Bay Area we have an interdisciplinary art community that can pump them out on a regular basis, but the costs to people's personal lives are immense. (Not to mention that people who like to create this sort of stuff rarely want to run it on a regular basis. They want to be Imagineers in their spare time, not full-time carnies.)

And what do we get when people show up? People seem to enjoy _looking_ at the bizarre interactive stuff -- it gives them permission to be freer -- but most people, it seems, want formulaic experiences. They like dancing at sound camps, intoxication, and riding around on art cars in costumes. Which is just a typical Friday night clubbing, only more so.

But rather than criticize them for being unadventurous, let's look at what makes these experiences work. Music was invented a few hundred thousand years ago and there aren't many more direct routes to people's pleasure centers. It's also evergreen; a sound camp can swap DJs every few hours and have a different experience in the same environment.

Complicated art or interactive installations do their thing, but if you have a five ton sculpture that whirls boulders around, well, that's what it does. Rarely can they be as protean as a music hall or a movie house, or your personal computer.

The best you can do is some sort of hardware/software combination, like the Cubatron series, which has had various incarnations as a sort of 3d screen saver build out of LEDs. Syzygryd is an interactive, collaborative music sequencer in the shape of a giant sculpture that lights up and shoots fire.

Perhaps the best urban interactive experiences will be like that -- there might be some expensive hardware built component, but they need to plug into some inexhaustible source of new ideas too.

</comment><comment><USER27> Movies trade gargantuan fixed costs for low marginal costs. Probably a trillion dollars over the last 100 years has been spent making, distributing, and screening movies. Theaters are a channel where a studio can expect to put $100M in and get $75-200M out, $10 at a time. (more if you count shady Hollywood accounting). Not only do unique experiences have much higher marginal costs, there is no channel or business model for huge amounts of money to invest in producing these experiences.

To put in perspective, he listed 2 experiences that might have thousands of visitors a week. Eyeballing last week's box office results, it looks like ~$150M across major movies. That means _15 MILLION_ people went to the movies last week just in the US.

Movies are a cost and effort-effective way to be entertained, and a predictable and profitable way to invest huge amounts of money. That's why there's everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER28> One thing that is amazing to me is how theaters are really pushing to fill seats with special event viewings and attempts to rent out their theaters for meetings, and all the while, if they actually had a stage in their theaters, they could probably make money in off hours with local productions.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been to two 'Immersive Theater' 'experiences' which sound similar to the spy experience mentioned in the article. And I found them rather contrived.

The actors stick to a script, and any attempt to interact or change the outcome of the experience is largely ignored. If I wanted to be ignored I'd go to the cinema, musical or a normal theater production.

Other experiences, e.g. Clay Shooting, treetop walks, jetboat rides and the such are generally prohibitively expensive to do once a week, and aren't really accessible unless you live close by. At least with the cinema I can afford to go once a week, see something different each, and it's a short walk/train/bus journey from home.

<comment><USER30> this is disingenuous. there are other elements to immersive theatre than being included in the script. would you say the same about going to a play?

that said, i've been to shows where they use the audience. it depends on the production. likewise, i'm sure there are some movies you enjoy and some you wouldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is sort of what Sleep No More <http://sleepnomore.com/> is doing and it's pretty successful. It's also in a place where that sort of thing can thrive.

<comment><USER32> The OP called this out by the theater company's name, Punchdrunk, and dismissed it as "pretentious."

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Secret Cinema are already doing this in London, they create the full experience immersing you in the feeling of the film with unique locations and themes.

Here's what they did for One flew over the Cukoo's nest - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nHZAZZqOqM>

Likewise Bugsy Malone - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOnswf7XaOE>

</comment><comment><USER34> The 5 Wits thing mentioned sounds a lot like the Jejune Institute in SF. There's a whole city in the desert called Las Vegas that was explicitly designed as an experiential entertainment venue. One could argue that entire areas of New York have become theme parks offering constructed urban lifestyle experiences. Related, the way Americans consume travel and outdoor recreation is very engineered for specific experiences.

</comment><comment><USER35> The logical extreme (depicted): <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/>

<comment><USER36> I was thinking more <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070909/> , myself...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you want the flying experience, there is Thrill Park near Dallas.

<http://www.gojump.com/>

Their bungee jumping on steroids, dropping face up from 120 feet, is so scary that it was used in studies of time perception:

<http://www.k2i.rice.edu/EventsList.aspx?EventRecord=17603>

</comment><comment><USER38> _What am I missing?_

Dear Author: you are missing Winkel and Blaktrick <http://www.wandbevents.com/redesign/>

They host events that are exactly the experiences you describe as missing from the city, and they are local to NYC.

Pro-tip: Don't go to the monthly events, only go to the seasonal ones that have a theme and story.

<comment><USER39> Winkel and Balktick are great.

I'm from NYC; this past Saturday there was a secret Night Market. Not a Winkel and Balktick event per se, but with some of the same people involved.

A Night Market is a collection of box trucks, rented for the evening and parked together in a deserted neighborhood of the city; each truck is kitted out with some form of experience/entertainment: one gave out perogis, another served tea; one was called "Thunder Cube" and hosted big pillow fights; the most elaborate one had a functioning hot tub.

The event's location was kept secret until the last minute, and attendance was limited.

My girlfriend and I produced a truck; it was called the "Peek-a-Boo Lounge" and was simply a place for people to sit and socialize. We used lumber, fabric, and sofa cushions to decorate the back of a 24-foot box truck, turning it into a two-level maze where people crawled around on their knees. There were 2 sets of day-glo Connect Four, a pair of naughty dice (leftover from a Valentine's Day event) and a day-glo stuffed carrot (leftover from Bugs Bunny costume).

It took the two of us a couple of days and about $600 to build (including truck rental). People seemed to enjoy it, judging from the laughter we heard in back; it was childlike. We received donations to help pay for the project.

I've found it's critical to find projects with good "bang-for-the-buck"; you want to enjoy yourself even when you're working.

These sort of "experiences" work because of the community they foster, and because they rely on imagination; much of the 'entertainment" is really just a cheap trick and that's part of the fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> You know how everyone wonders how "unskilled" people will make money in the post-material-scarcity future? This is one of the answers. Only one of many answers, but one nonetheless. You can add value to someone's "experience" and capture some of it.

</comment><comment><USER41> What about modernizing the arcade game experience, I would love to see this scaled out:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY&feature=player_embedded)

</comment><comment><USER42> I always wanted a movie version of those Choose Your Adventure books. Go to Theater A if you want to kill him.

</comment><comment><USER43> Everyone here is talking about the limitations of scale and repeat-business when it comes to these "experiences"

Science Fiction writers have solved these problems already, just tap directly into the brain, Minority Report style. Now all you scientists just need to catch up.

<comment><USER10> _Now all you scientists just need to catch up._

No, we just need to find the small door. John Malkovich won't be amused, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> When we build the Metaverse.

</comment><comment><USER45> " _What am I missing?_ "

Scale.

<comment><USER38> or LSD</comment></comment>